To say that we live in difficult times is to say something obvious. As a person from Poland, I have had this feeling since the beginning of war in Ukraine. Just as a person, I’ve had this feeling since the pandemic’s outbreak. People are afraid of WWIII. People are afraid of nuclear war. And people are still afraid of pandemic. The apocalypse of a fictional pandemic killing off almost all people, or half the population, is as dreadful as any other apocalypse. And so, after a way, such stories help to cope with fears; not only with the fear of coronavirus, but with the fear of war, of social ties being broken and of havoc ravaging the world.
Here are some of them. They made me afraid. They made me moved. They made me understand. In the end, they brought me not fear but katharsis.
The books which were the most hard for me were The Book of an Unnamed Midwife and The Book of Etta by Meg Ellison. The first describes the outbreak of the pandemic (which killed almost all women and made giving birth almost impossible) and the following events. The unnamed heroine, once a nurse, passes for a man in this post-apocalyptic world to protect herself and helps the female survivors as much as she can. She travels through the ravaged US, witnessing all kinds of violence. It isn’t a novel which is unecessarily brutal, but it’s brutal and shattering when it needs to be. It’s depressing and beautiful at once, exploring themes of the end of the world, of survival and abandonment. It’s set in the time when most men have turned into monsters, and in the place where canned food and snowmobiles are sad remnats of the old world.
There’s no hope, and for a long time. Finally, the unnamed protagonist finds a fort where people try to preserve some ways of the old times. There, violence is cut short and the community is centered around women. Some people marry, some live in hives where women have several partners out of their own choice. And childbirth is still very dangerous. When healty surviving children are finally born, it’s like a miracle. And a spark of hope.
Several generations later, we follow the story of Etta, born in Fort Nowhere and travelling around to save women from other, often dangerous and violent, communities. Etta doesn’t conform to the norms of the fort, and is coded as transmasculine. And, yes, the places she/he visits are either uncanny or brutal. It’s a strange mix: The future where queer people and people of colour have their lives, their dreams and goals (and I’m so glad that Ellison didn’t forget about this) but where toxic masculinity can ruin the enclaves of quiet, more or less harmonious existence. So, do we need post-apocalyptic novels in which the sparks of hope ar so tiny, and the sense of emptiness pervades? Do we need to be reminded how quickly women’s rights can be taken away and how quickly the civilization can collapse? I think we do. That’s not easy, but sometimes we need the uneasy. Sometimes we need difficult answers for difficult questions.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is another novel about a pandemic which killed off almost all people, and about the end of the old world. This time, however, a virus called Georgian flu wipes away women and men alike, leaving the remaining people gathered around old airports, motels and stations, at least in the US and in Canada. But it’s also, after a way, meta-textual, the novel about art and the meaning of it. Descriptions of post-apocalyptic world are intertwined with discussions on theatre, books, movies, and comics. The story of an itinerant troupe of actors and musicians is as important as the pre-pandemic story of Arthur Leander, a Canadian actor, and his convoluted life. His first wife, Miranda, is the character who gives meaning to the others after the catastrophe through the art she’s left, even if she becomes one of the pandemic’s victims. Her comic, telling the story of space and longing, is actually eponymous. There’s a lot of sadness in all this, a pervading longing for very ordinary things, such as gazettes, the Internet, tv guides. Some parts about the past are maybe even too long and sometimes look out of place. But in some form, they are needed. They are needed to remind us of how much has been lost forever. But they also remind of hope. In the end, there’s a possibility that in some communities, the old technology is being restored.
If the books by Emily St. John Mandel and Meg Ellison have something in common, it’s the notion of collapse. In this way or another, civilization ends in their settings, and communities really turn postapo. But I’ve read another pandemic novel in which, surprise, surpsise!, our civilization survived. It’s The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird. This time, a mysterious epidemic kills almost half the population. Almost all men. Only 3% of them survive, and the novel describes thoroughly the outbreak, the survival, the work of female scientists to find a vaccine, and the return to normalcy, if such a thing is possible at all. There are different point of views from many parts of the world, but the most of the story is focused on the UK, Scotland, Canada, and the US. And you may expect that this novel gives another vibe than the previous ones. I didn’t feel endangered as I was reading it. Gradually, I started feeling hope, actually. Here, civilization survives. Here, women don’t turn cruel on the men who remained. Here, there’s still the Internet and Netflix after the catastrophe. Can you imagine?
In this novel, there are difficult emotions, but they are connected more to the sense of loss and seclusion than to anything else. It’s one of the few moments when you feel privileged as a woman: You read about a catastrophe and you know that you would be safe. Also, it’s very interesting to watch how the post-pandemic society is reshaped without tropes of poligyny (many women came out to be bisexual) and without men treated as the entitled.
It was probably the safest novel for me out of those four, the one which in the end gives more hope than fear. Pandemic novels aren’t a monolith: They can be terryfying, they can be elegiac, they can be hopeful, sometimes all these things at once. I’m going to read them on because all things considered, they are more helpful when it comes to deal with your difficult emotions than triggering.
Left Hand of Fiction 